The adjusted line and the net line look in opposite directions
In the second quarter Nebius reported revenue of 582.3 million dollars against 105.1 million dollars a year earlier, a rise of 454 per cent. Adjusted EBITDA swung from a loss of 21.0 million dollars to a profit of 236.2 million dollars. Those two lines are the strongest evidence in the release that scale has begun to carry the cost base.[1]
The same release records a quarterly net loss from continuing operations of 190.4 million dollars. Across the first half, adjusted EBITDA was a profit of 365.7 million dollars and the result from continuing operations a profit of 430.8 million dollars. The measure that turned positive and the line that reports a loss describe the same three months on different perimeters. Adjusted EBITDA on its own does not say whether a quarter earned the capital behind it.[1]
The capital comes first, the schedule later
The same question is asked by the CoreWeave quarter with larger figures. The revenue backlog rose 246 per cent year over year to 104.2 billion dollars, and a further 25 billion dollars of commitments arrived early in the third quarter. Capital spending over the same three months was 9.352 billion dollars, against 2.938 billion dollars a year earlier.[2]
The power figures make the distance concrete: about 4.2 gigawatts of contracted power at quarter end against about 1.5 gigawatts of active power. The gap is the physical form of capital not yet spent. Customer commitments may be funding part of that spending in advance, in which case the book is itself part of the financing. Even so, the size of the book and the schedule of the investment that makes it deliverable are two separate pieces of information, and the release puts a figure only on the first.[2]
The release that writes the conversion down
Cisco's fiscal-year release gives a comparable magnitude in a different form. AI infrastructure orders totalled 9.3 billion dollars in fiscal 2026, and the company expects 7.5 billion dollars of revenue from that line in fiscal 2027. Total revenue guidance stands between 72.2 billion dollars and 73.4 billion dollars. Here the order amount, a year and the expected revenue are published together.[3]
This column took up the schedule between an amount signed and the amount booked in a quarter on August 7, and that finding holds here, because multi-year commitments turn into revenue on a long schedule while the cost of the capacity to serve them appears in the income statement earlier. For later quarters the Cisco ratio gives a measurable point of comparison for companies that publish a backlog. One of these three companies can be expected, before the year ends, to put a figure on how much of its backlog converts to revenue over the following twelve months.[2], [3], [4]
The three releases answer the same economic question at different levels of detail. That scale has begun to carry the cost base is what Nebius shows with an adjusted measure, the size of the commitment is what CoreWeave shows, and how much of the order becomes revenue and in which year is what Cisco writes down. The third piece of information is what makes the comparison possible, and the first two releases do not carry that line.[1], [2], [3]